States Can’t Keep Criminal Fines of Exonerated, Supreme Court Rules

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a Colorado law that made it hard for criminal defendants whose convictions were overturned to get refunds of the fines and restitution they had been ordered to pay.

“Colorado may not presume a person, adjudged guilty of no crime, nonetheless guilty enough for monetary exactions,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.

The vote was 7 to 1. Five justices joined Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concurred on other grounds. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who just joined the court, did not participate.

The state law required people cleared by the courts to file separate civil suits and prove their innocence with clear and convincing evidence to obtain reimbursement. Critics said the law was part of a national trend to extract fees and fines from people who find themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

The law was challenged by Shannon Nelson and Louis Madden, who had been ordered to pay thousands of dollars in fees and restitution after they were convicted of sex offenses. After their convictions were overturned, they filed motions in their criminal cases seeking refunds of what they had paid.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that their trial courts lacked authority to compensate them. Under Colorado’s law, the State Supreme Court said, they had to file new civil suits and meet a heightened burden of proof.

In dissent in the State Supreme Court, Justice William W. Hood III said the law “flips the presumption of innocence” by requiring defendants seeking refunds to prove their innocence by clear and convincing evidence.

“I struggle,” he wrote, “to see how we can sanction a system that makes money immediately due without providing for its return when reversible error occurs.”

Before the United States Supreme Court, Colorado maintained that the challenged law went further than the Constitution required. The state said it was free not only to impose onerous procedures, but also to enact a law making exonerated defendants forfeit the money entirely.

In dissent, Justice Thomas agreed. The money paid by Ms. Nelson and Mr. Madden, he wrote, “now belongs to the state and the victims under Colorado law.”

Justice Ginsburg disagreed. “The convictions pursuant to which the state took petitioners’ money were invalid,” she wrote, “hence the state had no legal right to retain their money.”

Colorado said the question in the case was similar to that of whether states must pay people for the time they spend in prison after their convictions are thrown out. Since such people need not be compensated, the state said, there is also no need to reimburse them for fines and fees.

“The comparison is inapt,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “Nelson and Madden seek restoration of funds they paid to the state, not compensation for temporary deprivation of those funds.”

“Petitioners seek only their money back, not interest on those funds for the period the funds were in the state’s custody,” she wrote. “Just as the restoration of liberty on reversal of a conviction is not compensation, neither is the return of money taken by the state on account of the conviction.”

Justice Ginsburg wrote that the legal analysis in the case, Nelson v. Colorado, No. 15-1256, was straightforward.

“Absent conviction of a crime, one is presumed innocent,” she wrote. “Under the Colorado law before us in these cases, however, the state retains conviction-related assessments unless and until the prevailing defendant institutes a discrete civil proceeding and proves her innocence by clear and convincing evidence.”

“This scheme, we hold, offends the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process,” she wrote.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Reject a State Law On Refunding Criminal Fines. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe